


Only for a moment

by ziamnerds



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending tho, M/M, im sorry, no girlfriendos, theres sex but its not very graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-05 17:32:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5384315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziamnerds/pseuds/ziamnerds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're just best mates, At least, that’s what Zayn tells himself when Liam’s calloused hands find Zayn’s skin underneath his shirt. Liam is kissing his neck softly, leaving traces of bruises behind with his lips. Zayn doesn’t quite recall why they started this little tryst, this affair, but lately he has found himself with his hands down Liam’s pants rather than not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only for a moment

**Author's Note:**

> so this happened

They're just best mates, At least, that’s what Zayn tells himself when Liam’s calloused hands find Zayn’s skin underneath his shirt. Liam is kissing his neck softly, leaving traces of bruises behind with his lips. Zayn doesn’t quite recall why they started this little tryst, this affair, but lately he has found himself with his hands down Liam’s pants rather than not.

At first, Zayn was very happy with their agreement. Getting each other off on whilst tour without any strings attached seemed like a great idea. It was sneaking into lonely rooms and stepping out of them with messy hair and tousled clothing. It was brilliant and Zayn felt good. It was a wonderful distraction from reality until it wasn’t-

Liam pushes them onto a bed, Zayn falls back against the mattress with a bounce. The sheets are a bit too cold but Zayn barely notices because Liam’s warm body is blanketing over his own with his strong hands moving over Zayn’s torso opening up the buttons on his (Liam’s) plaid shirt. Usually this is rough and fast. It’s pulling each other’s clothes off, almost ripping the fabric apart with the force. Its sore lips and bruised hips. Its frustration vented out through the movement of bodies together.

Liam hands are careful, his fingers softly dragging across Zayn’s skin. Liam’s kisses are soft, a warm press of lips against Zayn’s. He’s torn between wanting the bruising kisses and this, because it doesn’t make any sense. Liam isn’t supposed to touch him in a way that pulls strings inside his heart, and something settles between his ribs that is heavy, because he knows feelings wasn’t what they agreed on.

Liam hums against his lips, a ghost of a smile still present on his lips. He presses his hips into Zayn’s, making them both gasp from the friction. Liam rips Zayn’s shirt off of him all of a sudden the gentle and the slow of Liam’s movements is gone. 

“Liam” Zayn breathes moving down his hands down Liam’s back finding the hem of his shirt and pulling it off him. Zayn lives for the feeling of Liam’s skin against his. He lives for Liam filling all his senses. Sometimes, he’s so caught up in Liam, Zayn has to remind himself that it’s just sex. Nothing more, even though Liam’s touches feels like something beyond just sex, but maybe it’s only Zayn’s imagining things.

Liam kisses down his torso and electricity courses through Zayn’s veins, warmth blooming deep inside his gut. Their hearts are beating in sync as their bodies move together and Zayn focuses on Liam’s touches instead of the heavy feeling that is rooting inside his ribcage. (He tries not to think about how Liam’s kisses tastes like honey but how they make him ache like he has been consuming poison.)

They’re usually louder than this. Normally, Zayn tells Liam exactly what he wants, and how he wants it. Zayn can’t quite make himself do that right now. It’s like the poisonous knowledge inside his chest is spreading out to his limbs and his mouth, making him numb. It’s strange, Zayn thinks, how the silence can be so loud and how his thoughts could be even louder.

“Hey, you okay?” Liam stops abruptly kissing Zayn’s stomach because maybe he notices how quiet Zayn is, and Zayn wants to encourage Liam to go on so he doesn’t have to deal with his thoughts, but the words seems to get stuck inside his throat and all he can do is slightly shake his head.

Liam scrambles off of him and goes to lie down next to Zayn, tucked against his side.  
“I’m sorry. Did I do something wrong?” Liam asks with concerned voice, with a gentle hand placed on Zayn’s bare chest.

“Nothing is wrong, I just don’t really feel like myself today,” Zayn hears himself lie and the taste is bitter in his mouth. Liam being so close to him, radiating warmth with his arm flung around Zayn’s torso and his head resting beside Zayn, it makes it hard to breathe. His lungs are constricting, the walls closing in, draining out all the air  
It aches to have Liam so close to him, but it feels oddly good to hurt.

“Are you sure? I didn’t say something did I?” Liam wonders again, his brown eyes filled with concern and Zayn presses his lips to Liam’s to make him realise he didn’t do anything bad, but maybe he kisses him to feel the sweet taste of Liam’s soft lips again, maybe it’s to savour it in the back of his mind because he does not know when he gets to kiss Liam again.

The moment he pulls away his stomach sinks – Kissing each other when it’s not leading to sex, is not what they’re about. That’s the relationship kind of kissing, the sweet only to be close kind of kissing, and they’re definitely not in a relationship.

“I’m – I should go.” Zayn flees before he says something he can’t take back –  
Before he says what’s simmering inside his chest.

**  
The headboard rattles against the wall along with Liam’s movements, a distant sound that blends in with the noise of skin on skin and their soft moans echoing against the walls.

Zayn’s legs are wrapped around Liam’s waist, his body trembling underneath of Liam’s. Pleasure spreads up his spine, and it’s overwhelming, the warmth of Liam all over him, all around him, and his long slender fingers intertwined in Zayn’s hair.

His’s chest swells at the small touches Liam leaves across his collarbones, hips, arms, thighs. His fingers leave traces of goose bumps as he roams across Zayn’s skin. He savours his touches in the back of his mind – for nights when Liam’s body isn’t right beside his.

Zayn digs his nails into the skin of Liam’s back, his fingers leaving crescent moon shaped marks. He wants to leave small red scratches on his skin, just to label himself something to Liam, he isn’t allowed to.

Zayn is pulled under a wave with his toes curling and his lips spilling out Liam’s name, his body trembling underneath of Liam, his fingers tracing down Liam’s back, mapping out the places he wants to kiss and bite, later.

Liam moves his hips sloppily as he races towards his own finish line, then he stills, his body locking over Zayn’s, and he’s biting down on Zayn’s shoulder with a ghost of a moan on his lips. Zayn wonders distantly if he’s going to wake up with a purple bruise where his collarbone ends, and Zayn wishes Liam could bite more into his skin so Zayn could savour it, for a little while.

Liam pulls out and the mattress dips as he goes to lie beside Zayn, their shoulders the only part left of their bodies touching. The warmth from Liam still lingers on Zayn’s skin but he knows that the feeling is going to subside soon enough. Zayn wants to reach out and touch him, to feel Liam’s skin underneath his fingertips again, but his limbs are heavy like lead and he’s scared Liam might disentangle from him if Zayn tries to hold him.

They stay together like that, both of them panting with drowsy heads. He waits for Liam to get up and leave the room, but instead he rests his hand on Zayn’s stomach, presses his nose to the back of Zayn’s neck. They’re lying close to each other, the kind of closeness Zayn craves at late nights when he’s all alone. Still, Zayn longs to get lost within the spaces of Liam’s arms, to have his warmth next to him as he sleeps, but Zayn doesn’t know how to say, or how to know if Liam wants the same.

Liam’s breaths are slow and deep, Zayn wonders if he’s sleeping. He doesn’t want to turn around in the bed if Liam wakes from his movements. He settles for calling out his name, soft and quiet in the middle of the night. 

“Are you awake?”

“Almost.” Liam replies, his voice distant and soft, his lips moving against the tattoo in Zayn’s neck.

“What did you mean when you said you didn’t feel like you could be in a relationship?” Zayn wonders. He knows he’s stepping out on thin ice, crossing the boundaries Liam had so carefully set up between them. ‘This is just fooling around, No strings attached alright? Just a bit of fun.’

Liam stays quiet for a while, almost like he decided staying awake for Zayn’s questions wasn’t worth his time and fell asleep.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve always been the one who has fallen first and too hard and I don’t think anyone would ever fall as deeply in love with me. So I’ve just avoided relationships, I guess.” His voice is quiet, shy almost, so unlike from the usual warm and energetic Liam he knows.

“Don’t you think what we’re doing is a relationship then?” The words slips out of Zayn’s mouth before he can stop them. Immediately, the hand that was resting on Zayn’s stomach slips away and Liam’s lips from Zayn’s neck disappear and everything turns cold, too quickly.

“It’s just sex, Zayn.” It seems as if the warmth inside of Liam’s voice is sucked out, leaving a version of it Zayn has rarely heard before. It’s like he’s put up a barricade between him and Zayn and he doesn’t know how to tear those walls down again. “Maybe we should stop this. Before someone gets hurt.” Liam is pulling on his clothes now, with an urgency, like he needs to get away from Zayn as soon as possible.

The words echo in Zayn’s head. ‘Maybe we should stop this.’ Zayn doesn’t want them to stop. He has come to find that everything he craves lies within Liam’s lips and suddenly losing that, seems impossible.

**

They don’t stop.

They continue fooling around at late nights in anonymous hotel rooms. It’s quick shags and then poorly made excuses that they have to leave. It’s Zayn drowning, trying to grasp what’s left of his oxygen when he thinks about how Liam looks post-orgasm, his brown eyes soft like caramel, a daydream flickering behind his irises, his cheeks flushed and his hair tousled. He’s drowning when he thinks about how all that warmth was suddenly gone when Zayn hinted he wanted something more. He’s drowning when he thinks about the fact that he’s kind off in love with Liam.

Zayn knows it would’ve been easier to deal with if Liam wasn’t his best friend, and if they weren’t around each other day in and day out. Maybe he wouldn’t have fallen this hard. But somehow, if he could take it all back and never had slept with Liam for the first time that night, he wouldn’t.

Before, Zayn never quite believed a person could alter you, change the way you move, the way you breathe, forever. – Until he fell in love with Liam. To Zayn, there’s a version of him before Liam, and a version after. Zayn knows that he’ll never be the person he once was, forever altered by the moment Liam walked into his life and made Zayn feel things he didn’t know how to deal with.

**  
“Remember how you said you didn’t think anybody could fall deeply in love with you?" Zayn whispers, his voice shaking from the pounding of his heart inside his chest. 

“Yeah?”

“You were wrong.”

And that’s that. Liam lies in silence staring at Zayn with wide brown eyes, the city lights from outside the hotel window reflecting on Liam’s skin, making him look like a painting hung somewhere in an art gallery - unreachable and beautiful.

(They lie like that until Zayn falls asleep, and in the next morning, the bed is cold and Liam’s clothes on the floor are gone.)

**

It’s a foggy morning when Zayn decides. He’s lying on cold sheets without a warm body next to him because Liam left early in the night. He breathes in and out heavily because he knows what he has to do. - He has to leave. It’s been present in the back of his mind ever since Zayn told Liam he was in love with him, and the way Liam looked terrified when he told him.

Maybe running from his problems wasn’t what his parents taught him, or what he usually does, but he doesn’t know how to fight this, when his heart is already bruised and broken in the middle.

Zayn packs his bags with a constant urgency in his hands, a sudden anxiety blooming inside his veins because he knows if he leaves everything behind, his life is going to change.

He takes a plane home with the promise of just a ‘few days break’ to everyone. He tells them it’s because he’s exhausted and needs some time- and they all believe him. He doubt Liam did – The way he searched Zayn’s gaze because maybe somewhere he knows Zayn is just making excuses, but Zayn left the room before Liam could reel him in his arms and ask him what was wrong. Zayn doesn’t know if he could handle that, since Liam is mainly the reason why he’s leaving it all behind, the reason for his heartache. 

He doesn’t know if he’s going to book plane tickets back as he looks out the airplane window, because he doesn’t know if he can handle his heart shattering more and more inside his chest every time he so much looks at Liam. Despite Zayn leaving everything behind, he still doesn’t feel like he’s closed the chapter, because his heart might just still be there in the cold bed he and Liam shared the night before.

***  
London is different from LA, colder and rainier, but Zayn enjoys the familiarity of it. He finds peace in the fact that his family is only a short car trip away, not a thousand miles and a sea between, but now too, he knows that the boys – that Liam, is back in England again. He knows Liam is only a few miles away, just across the town. He also knows he could pick up the phone and finally talking to him again. Over the past few months, Liam had tried to talk to Zayn, but Zayn couldn’t make himself answer when he was trying so hard to finally get over Liam. He did answer once, a late night too tired to make any good decisions.

“I miss you.” Liam had choked out, his voice slurred as he spoke and Zayn knew that he was intoxicated, probably off somewhere by himself making emotion and alcohol influenced decisions that he’d probably regret the day after. (Zayn hates how much he still knows about Liam, how much of his detail is still engraved in his mind.)

“I miss you too.”

“If you miss me, why won’t you reply to me texts or me calls?” Liam sounds suddenly so sad and Zayn chest is bleeding, his heart beating painfully against his ribs.

“I don’t think I can bare hearing your voice or your laugh without falling even more in love with you.” It comes out as a whisper, but Liam’s sharp intake of breath confirms he heard it clearly, anyways.

“So you’re just cutting me out of your life? Just like that?” The words aren’t an accusation from Liam’s lips but a hopeless question, a surrender.

“Until I get over you. Or if you realise you’re in love with me too.” The line goes utterly silent and Zayn imagines Liam curling in on himself, closing his eyes and hearing Zayn’s voice echo in his head. He sort of wants his voice to bounce around in Liam’s head, the same way Liam’s eyes and lips spun around inside his head, round and round, like a hawk circling its prey.

“What do I do if I realise I have feelings for you too?” Liam voice slurs and Zayn realises he’s drunker than what he first thought he was, otherwise he probably wouldn’t ever bring up feelings for Zayn. He’s built up those walls for so long, around his heart, shooting down anyone ever trying to get close.

“I’ll guess you’ll have come around to my house and tell me.”

Zayn sighs because he’s too much of a coward to call Liam again, it’s been months since that phone call and Liam hasn’t contacted him since, and maybe Zayn didn’t expect him too, but he also unconsciously looked at his phone every once in a while wishing Liam’s name would be there. He was always met with disappointment so after a while, he gave up.

He sometimes calls one of the boys to check how they’re doing, check how Liam is doing. It’s always the same mundane answer, that he’s happy and doing well.  
Zayn goes on social media instead to check if he’s doing okay, like a desperate ex, he somehow has become. Problem is, they were never lovers, it was only ever sex, only an arse and a dick and no feelings whatsoever. Despite that, Zayn is still mourning a heartbreak he never intended to have.

Zayn’s thoughts are interrupted by the sound of his doorbell, and he doesn’t remember having any visitors today, his family isn’t coming over until next week- Usually people don’t show up unannounced, but Zayn walks to open the door anyway. 

He opens the door and there he is, Liam. He is the smell after rain, he is the moment the clouds crack and sunlight beams through and shines upon the ground. He is the familiar sound of his hometown, the train on the tracks, the children laughing somewhere, and it all comes crashing back to him.  
“Hi.”

***  
"Remember how you said you didn't think anyone could ever fall deeply in love with you?" Zayn stares across at the man lying beside him in his bed, his brown eyes glittering like underneath his irises hides a whole galaxy.

"Yeah?"

"You were wrong." Zayn traces his fingers across Liam's chest absentmindedly, pulling himself closer into Liam's warmth again, eager to get lost within Liam soon. 

"Yeah I guess I was. It's good that I was wrong. Because I'm pretty in love with you too, Malik."

**Author's Note:**

> Say hi to me on [tumblr](http://ziamnerds.tumblr.com/) or yell at me, you know whatever im fine w it
> 
> also i hope u liked this!!


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